Cant open photos after moving to external drive

I have several photos libraries. I’ve been trying to consolidate my daughters libraries to one location. I have tried moving the library to an external drive from several different sources (one from Mac HD, another from External drive. The moved libraries show it is in the new drive but photos won’t open it. Jut get a spinning wheel forever. I’ve tried this on 2 different external drives. Both were formatted to APFS. I am still running Mojave. I know one of the libraries came off a dive formatted Mac extended. Could this be the problem?

it is a 260 GB library. When I tried to open another library it said it couldn’t while photos was creating a new library. However, it’s been over a hour and I see no status bar. Just not sure what to do next.

iMac 21.5″

Posted on Jan 1, 2024 3:48 PM

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

202,657 points

Posted on Jan 1, 2024 4:00 PM

How is the external drive connected to the Mac? It should have a wired connection, not a network connection.

And the xternal drive must not have been used for Time Machine backups.

You may want to check, if you can set the "Ignore ownership on this volume" flag. If that is not possible, the xternal drive cannot be used for Photos Libraries. See this document on how to set the flag: Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support

View in context

Cant open photos after moving to external drive

Similar questions